Others suggest that its fundamental problem is the repression of women. Notice how in the most benighted regions, girls are not allowed to be educated. They cannot even read and write. Girls' schools have been burned down, and that one jerk tried to kill a girl who spoke out against these practices. Greg Mortenson founded the Central Asia Institute specifically to attack this problem. (He has recently gotten some bad press and perhaps like all of us he has his dark side, but he has accomplished too much good to be dismissed over charges that have not been proven and in any case are of interest only to bookkeepers.) Mortenson was injured while climbing K2 (a vastly oversimplified summary of a complicated experience) and was taken in by the Muslim people of a Pakistani village who treated him with such love and care for so long that he vowed to spend the rest of his life trying to improve their lot. He saw little boys scratching marks on the dirt street with sticks and asked what they were doing. It turns out that this was their school: they had no building, no paper, pencils, chalk or blackboards. He was immediately struck by the observation that there were no girls in this primitive class in reading and writing. Only men were given the gift of literacy. Since then his institute has built dozens of schools in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Counting the ones it helped build, the number is close to 200. The schools come with only one condition: they must accept girls. It's okay if they're segregated by sex, but any village that educates its boys must also educate its girls. Every community must have a balance of male and female energy. When its women are limited to a subordinate role, it is out of balance and its children will not be raised well. In the villages where CAI schools are in operation, life is balanced, the people prosper, and peace and tolerance rule. Naturally the Taliban is anxious to burn down these schools. It's been stated succinctly that in our era, the key to peace is the education of women. A couple of years ago the Washington Post featured an article by a reporter who had managed to get interviews with members of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He learned that the members were strongly discouraged from going back to visit their homes. In fact he couldn't find anyone in the camps who had done so, although clearly some had made the journey. He tracked down a few of these deserters, still at home, and asked them why they didn't go back to the camps. Every single one of them said, "I couldn't face my mother."
All of the adults who treat women horribly were once children, most of those children were beaten. It's quite common. A young man from UAE once recalled how his earliest memory was of his face being held against the bathroom tiles as his father beat the shit out of him. His mother beat him regularly - daily. As he got older he started beating his younger siblings. So much so his mother and father would call him 'Lil Hitler' with a hint of pride in their voice. He once mentioned witnessing a mother beating the shit out of her child out in public right next to a police officer. Beating children is so common, it's not considered a crime. If you want adults who are not going to beat their wives and sisters, and treat them as equals, you're going to have to raise this new human from childhood and without beating them. I think you'll find many, if not most, of our problems develop for the same reason of poor parenting and beating children. Don't get me wrong, educating women is important, but IMO that's not going to solve the problem. Iran and KSA have a largly educated population of women. As a matter of fact, so do we. It didn't stop the phony Wars on Terror or moronic Wars on Drugs. We've put more people in prison than the Soviets and more than the Chinese. Just something to think about .... you know, the whole three fingers pointing back and all Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I was raised without corporal punishment and I can attest to that. I was spanked or slapped about five times total--and I don't object to that strenuously because I believe it's very important for children to grow up understanding that, right or wrong, it truly is possible to make someone so angry that they'll hit you. A lot of people these days seem to think that nobody has any limits. As a result of a non-violent home I somehow managed to create an entire bubble of non-violence around myself. I have never hit anyone in my entire life (b. 1943) and no one has ever hit me either. What goes around, comes around. Well I have to count the two teachers in junior high who swatted me with a paddle. But even at the time I realized that although I didn't deserve it, I was witnessing the phenomenon of making someone angry enough to hit me. Ironically one of the teachers was angry because I could diagram a sentence correctly that he couldn't figure out. Always the budding linguist. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This understanding served me well in the protests of the 1960s. I marched on all the picket lines for civil rights. (I lived in California, not Mississippi, so there wasn't much chance of being attacked by a mob of angry Rednecks.) But I never marched on the anti-war picket lines, even though I supported the movement. (Duh? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) If a group of people hates you specifically because they believe that violence is sometimes an appropriate way to resolve a dispute, I figured that the stupidest thing you can do is to make them angry. I think life is more complicated than that or we would have already figured it out. Look at some of the children who watched their families exterminated at Auschwitz, and grew up to be the kindest, wisest people on earth. They were betrayed by their entire species, not just their families, but they still see the good in us. It will be such a tragedy when the last Holocaust survivor dies. We need that perspective. The last slave, the last Confederate soldier... there have been so many people that I wish I could have talked to. Actually the man who claimed to be the last Confederate soldier died when I was 16, but I was too young and dumb to understand what that meant. I lived in Arizona where the schools had (from my perspective) always been integrated. As noted, no single tactic is going to solve a major problem, or somebody would have already figured it out.
Mail Online Sara Ege, 32, beat her son Yaseen to death with a hammer because he was struggling with his Islamic studies and then set fire to his body. Only she knows if she set him on fire before or after she murdered him. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I personally think it should be illegal to teach children superstitions about the Gods or the State as IMO both are a form of child abuse. Isn't it interesting that "England" (or the English people anyway) have come to accept such anti-Liberal ideals that Islam promulgates. On occasion I hear a poo-hoo from (English among others) about how un-accepting the Japanese are towards other cultures. For example, if you want citizenship, you must change your name to a Japanese name. The banks and shops are *gasp* all in Japanese (there's Romanji and some Chinese, but by and far it's all Japanese). Foreigners are *gasp* expected to change their culture to be more Japanese. Yet, for all these 'failings' you just don't find the ghettos and inner city crap holes that pot mark pretty much every Western country I've ever been to (except Germany - maybe I didn't visit the right places?). So, I agree, there is no one solution at this stage in our cultural development. I'd say that for me, not hitting children is a good start. Education is of course immensely important. I also think we need to stop being so accepting of backwards thinking that teach crap like hitting children (and wives) is OK so long as it's done by hand or by using a thin and light wooden stick.
The worst thing is not making someone angry. The worst thing is allowing them to carry on being dumb.
Hi Fraggle Rocker, my father was a war baby too and Queensland had a similar setup at the time. You have already seen the impacts of war. JFK must have had some good methods because he had six opportunities to take the US to war during his presidency and declined all of them.
Oh, bullshit. The Russians declined JFK's invitation at least once. It's known as the "Cuban Missile Crisis".
And in reference to the OP, there isn't a damned one of you here who would have given a flying fuck about Islam until it became de riguer to do so.
